Ulster and Brexit, a return of Britain's violent history

Brexiteers’ apparent willingness to cut loose the Northern Irish peace process reflects a historic world view that hasn’t advanced much since the English Civil War.

Image: For some, the sovereignty
of king-in-parliament is paramount, and little in the 'colonies' matters

In setting out his case
for a "liberal" Brexit last week, Boris Johnson made
no reference to Northern Ireland and whether a hard border on the island of
Ireland can be avoided if the UK leaves the EU single market and customs union.
He also failed to mention the issue in his long Daily Telegraph Brexit essay
last year. In the last few days, leading Brexiteers Hannan and Owen Paterson have
gone further, questioning the importance of the Good Friday Agreement and
supporting calls for a return to direct rule of Northern Ireland from
Westminster.

These are
perhaps cases of what the historian of political thought Richard Bourke has
called "Ulsterisation" in British history: the willingness of the
British state to sacrifice its colonial acquisitions to the maintenance of
political or constitutional stability at the Westminster core.

In the contemporary
instance, the Eurosceptic sacrifice of the Good Friday Agreement is deemed
necessary for the completion of a total break with the institutions of the EU,
despite the threat that poses to the peace and economic prosperity of Northern
Ireland. It may be one in which the Democratic Unionist Party is eventually
complicit.

For unionists, direct rule
could forestall a regulatory carve out of Northern Ireland from the rest of the
United Kingdom. As Bourke points out, colonial unionism was "continually
exposed to the possibility of extreme reversals", since the imperial
centre always stood ready to cut its losses. In the Home Rule crises of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bottom line for imperial
unionists was full Irish autonomy, since it was preferable to a federated union
that would compromise the integrity of Westminster sovereignty. It is
conceivable that today's heirs to the imperial unionist position prefer direct
rule and an end to power sharing over any compromise on a Hard Brexit. The
logic is impeccably Powellite.

Bourke's
treatment of Ulsterisation came in a long
essay on the work of the celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock,
and in particular, the latter's immensely influential plea for a "new
subject" of British history, made in a lecture in 1973, when the UK joined
the European Economic Community. Pocock saw this as the final act of a polity
that had steadily retreated from empire; it necessitated a new understanding of
the United Kingdom and its settler colonies as an "Atlantic
Archipelago" and Greater Britons as oceanic peoples sharing a geographically
dispersed political allegiance and participating in a sovereignty which had now
been surrendered.

In a later
article, written when debates on the Maastricht Treaty were
convulsing the Conservative Party, Pocock traced the historical centrality of
sovereignty in Westminster politics to the English experience of civil war:
"The experience of civil war was peculiarly felt by the English, and
they were entitled to regard it as unique in their history and their history as
unique because of it. The further, and less justifiable, consequence was that
they solved their own problems by imposing solutions on the neighbour
kingdoms and came to regard Scotland, Ireland and their histories - which they
did not trouble to learn - as a set of exterior causes disturbing the
continuity of the history of England, and this of course they still do."
"What is clear", Pocock argued, is "that the sovereignty
of king-in-parliament, devised in England for English purposes, has remained
the key to "British history" with a completeness that renders the
latter's existence contestable."

Pocock's
arguments help explain the provenance of contemporary English Conservative
arguments on Northern Ireland (and it should be remembered that Pocock himself
is Eurosceptic, believing the EU represents the abnegation of political agency
to the global operation of the market). Coincidentally, they also cast light on
the (deserved) popularity of the stunning exhibition at the Royal Academy, Charles
I: King and Collector. This exhibition, which reunites a number
of works of art that were dispersed in the Commonwealth Sale of Charles's
collection after his execution in 1649, has been criticised for
passing over the Civil War and the bloody divisions of the era. But this is to
miss Pocock's point. The exhibition represents a symbolic restoration of
the sovereign line, expressed in the majesty of the King's collection of
European art reunited in London. Although conceived long before the Brexit
vote, the exhibition can now be read as an intervention with historical
resonance, as the Kings works are returned from Europe and sovereign unity is
restored (those which remained in the Royal Collection, like Mantegna's
astonishing Triumphs
of Caesar, retained by Cromwell, are loaned by Her Majesty the
Queen). Dismemberment and dispersal are annulled, if only temporarily.

A hard border in
Northern Ireland will not be so easy to erase. The question of sovereignty and
the legacy of the multiple, often violent, histories of these isles will return
with force to Westminster in the months ahead.

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